On Echo Chambers and Media Polarization

As we mentioned a couple of days ago, a Norwegian university professor named Jill Walker Rettberg has helped to establish a new academic fellowship whose purpose will be to investigate extremism on the Internet. The professor pointed out that web extremists are able to inhabit their own “echo chamber” or “filter bubble”. As far as I could determine, the only extremists mentioned by name in the interview with her were Anders Behring Breivik and Fjordman.

Nevertheless, Prof. Rettberg insists that the new position will look at all types of extremism, and not just “right-wing extremism”. She left the following comment on the post earlier today:

Hey, thanks for linking to the article — we hope to have applications from people interested in examining any kind of extremism, we’re not simply interested in right-wing extremism. If you look at the actual job advertisement you’ll see that we’re trying to be open.

The whole idea of an echo chamber or the filter bubble is that we’re ALL in echo chambers and we have to make an effort if we want to see and hear view points from outside of it. The internet appears to exacerbate that. You can use it to find anything, but studies have also shown that political debate, for instance, is more polarised in blogs than on television. So yes, of course I recognise that I’m also in an echo chamber.

In response to Prof. Rettberg, our longtime reader, commenter, and contributor Egghead left the following comment on the same post. It’s worth reproducing in its entirety:

Who are you to label an anti-jihad point of view — which is backed up by over 1,400 years of evidence of Muslim violence and jihad war — as right-wing extremism?

Anyone with a grasp of both past history and current events would understand that the real extremism is exhibited by well-documented actions of Muslims who have always used — and still use — torture, rape, kidnap, mass murder, poll tax, and dhimmi slave status to clear Muslim countries of all non-Muslims — and also to conquer non-Muslim countries for the ummah.

One Response to THE TAKE DOWN OF A NORWEGIAN PROFESSOR……..

The guardian produced an infographic mapping where Brievik spent his time on the internet. Most of the websites he visited were “Main Stream Media”. Note: that is what The Guardian lables MSM, not what a right winger lables “MSM”.

How does what the Guardian constitute as Mainstream Media constitute a bubble?

He visited over 100 Nationalist Sites (not including counterjihadist) and over 100, by The Guardians opinion “MSM” sites. But only 11 counterjihad sites (the guardian listed 14 but 3 of those were Amazon pages for books).

The Guardian reporter who’s copy accompanied the infographic, though this information was clearly visible by examination of the infographic, COMPLETELY IGNORED IT and ONLY talked of the 11 counter jihad sites.

But that is immaterial anyway as the first and most thurough forensic evealuation of Brievic showed him to be not a right wing extremist, but a paranoid schizophrenic.

And as for Fjordman, it was always my understanding that his motivation was an antipathy to right wing extremism being imported into his country from abroad.

By that standard The Southern Poverty Law Center could be labled far right.

There’s no utopian solution for guiding human communities.

Daniel Greenfield explains Islam 101:

"Every devout Muslim is an "Islamist". Islam is not a personal religion. It is a religion of the public space. A "moderate" Muslim would have to reject Islam as a religion of the public space, as theocracy, and that secularism would be a rejection of Islam.

Nothing in Islam exists apart from anything else. While liberals view culture and religion as a buffet that they can pick and choose from, it is a single integrated system. If you accept one part, you must accept the whole. Once you accept any aspect of Islam, you must accept its legal system and once you accept that, you must accept its governance and once you accept that, you lose your rights.''

BLOGGING FROM FINLAND

The UN, ''a crooked court with jury hanging judges'' It's the international Jim Crow of our times. Israel can expect the same kind of ‘justice” from the UN, that a Black African American could expect in the formerly segregated southern states of the US.